Ouzo... is a bit stronger than I expected.

Now, I have to admit I'm a beer guy. I don't usually touch much of the harder stuff, and when I do, I know my limit. Ouzo is very, very deceptive. It looks like a normal little glass of water, and tastes like candy going down. It leaves a very little pleasant warmth in the belly, and getting my hand squeezed happily by Maria while it was going on after the first two was idyllic.

But then it hits, and you find that the entire world has gone both soft focus and comedy at the same time. After the third one I found that I no longer minded the twang of the bouzouki quite as much and that standing up and dancing with Maria along with Nikki and half of the rest of the wedding party seemed like a really great idea.

I didn't know the steps, and at that point nobody seemed to care. It was pretty simple, at least, and involved a lot of hand raising and simultaneous kicking at certain points. After a while I started wondering why the heck Nikki's husband wasn't participating, because I was finding this to be some of the most fun I'd had in a long time.

When we finally returned to our table, I was actually sweating, and had to remove my outer garment just to get a little air. The sky had completely darkened outside now, and cheers of the crowd throughout the room seemed to be almost like a kind of refrain of joy every few minutes. The pleasant warmth had turned into a bit of a curl in my stomach at this point, and I was grateful to grasp at the water carafe and pour myself another glass.

"Dinner and Dancing. Ok, we are totally going old school on the date." Maria laughed and patted my hand again after she had caught her breath.

"Well, I've never been to something like this." I acknowledged. "My wedding was pretty small, and we just wanted to get out of there for the most part."

"Dat never ends well." Nikki sighed. "Course a big family wedding is no guarantee of success." She jerked her thumb at the booth in the corner, where her husband had now removed his sports coat and had broken out a smart phone, which he was gesticulating to wildly.

A sudden thought ran through my head that Nikki had said something about phones and her uncle Gus.

The sound of breaking plastic and glass was very audible in the room, and nearly every person's attention was drawn to the booth in the corner of the restaurant. The older man held a cane in one hand, and it had come down hard on the table. Underneath the cane lay the shattered remains of a smart phone, and the look of fury on the guy's face was palpable.

Across from him, the man I knew to be Nikki's husband looked positively apoplectic as he looked down at the spiderweb pattern refracting the image of whatever powerpoint he had been using. His hands came down on the table hard, and he yelled something loudly that I wish I could do justice to. There were a lot of sibilants, and from the reaction, it was dirty as hell. That resulted in another insult in what I now know is Greek.

Now, everybody in that room swears that George threw the first punch. I can't say I saw with any clarity, but I will attest that George definitely did put his hands on the old guy first. Grabbed his lapel and looked like he was gonna try to shake him. That resulted in the old guy swinging his cane, and that's about the point at which enough people started swarming in that we really couldn't see what was going on.

"Gamo ti poutana mou." Nikki expectorated the words, rising to her feet. She seemed a little unsteady, and I recalled that she had had one or four of those little glasses in her hand at points during the last hour or so.

We ended up crossing the restaurant rapidly, the three of us joining the rest of the crowd. It was over by the time that we'd gotten close enough to actually see through the throng of heads. Enough to see a old man with a bloody nose, holding a napkin to his face, and Nikki's husband being held back by two other people. His face still bore an expression of rage, and the slight red mark on his cheek suggested he'd taken a whack or two.